It takes an exceptional IT operations team to keep an entire company up and running on a daily basis. From employee requests, trialling new software, managing assets, onboarding new company employees, being in the IT operations team is never boring. 

This workflow guide will help streamline the process of IT operations through the help of three functional boards. It will focus on IT onboarding of new company employees, inventory management and the procurement process, each of which play a pivotal role in keeping everything together on the back- end.  In addition, we'll focus on important features, such as views and automations on each of these boards to create the optimal workflows.

Without further ado, let's jump right in. 

Setting up your IT Onboarding board

This board's essence is to make sure that each new team member joining the company will be set up quickly and efficiently, with as little logistical hurdles as possible. This will streamline the entire onboarding process so that the onboarding of multiple employees can be done to meet the demands of a growing company. The names of new employees as well as other important details will usually come from the HR department, so cross-team collaboration will happen here too. 

This board is grouped by timeframes - the new employees being onboarded per month. Each employee will be added as an item, and be assigned an IT owner (whoever will be responsible for their onboarding) as well as HR owner, for reference. Each column will reflect an important and necessary task in the onboarding process, whether it be getting their equipment, access to services, specific permissions and so on. 

Reduce the stress with automation reminders 

Your IT teams have a lot on their plate. With the help of automations you can reduce some of the burden by getting rid of manual steps. Automation reminders allow your team work through their tasks, and as important deadlines approach they will be notified automatically and can plan accordingly. This is an essential automation we've added to our board:

 To learn more about the different kind of automations that exist, check this out. 

Tip:  Add board filters to narrow down to specific statuses or assigned tasks and focus better on exactly what's coming up. . To learn about board filters, check this out.

Make it more visual with Timelines

Accustomed to viewing your upcoming tasks on a Timeline, to plan ahead better and stay in control? With the Timeline View, you can do exactly that. Visualize new employees joining on daily, weekly or monthly basis and always be one step ahead!

Set up your Inventory Management board 

This is the core inventory board, alllowing you to track and manage every piece of IT equiptment in your company's hands. This is a simple board, which will be grouped based on the different types of equiptment, with a dedicated top group to manage all the hardware that require maintanance work. Keep track of the serial number per piece, which employee is currently using it and any important dates such as last checked and handover date with various column types.

Boost this workflow with more Automations 

As with the automations on the previous board, these automations will create reminder noticiations to send the equipment for specific checks every couple of months, to switch out old hardware and reach out to company employees before they reach out to the team - that's what we call top-notch service! 

Create your Procurement Process Board

This is the last board that we will go over, and an extremely important one to ensure seamless collaboration and that privacy/legal standards are always met. A procurement process is a common practice for all types of companies to test out, analyze and introduce new products and services into the company. This board will function as an approval board, so that different stakeholders from the all over the company can easily collaborate and approve of the purchase.

All new services that need to be reviewed will be placed in the "Reviewing" group at the top. The rest of the board is grouped by department, so it's clear exactly what approved services were requested by which department. While in the reviewing phase, the service will go through various approval stages- by the IT team, POC owner, Finance, Legal and Security teams. Once the final stamp of approval is received, the service can be moved to the relevant department. 

Stay on top of everything with date reminders

A vital part of the managing your services is ensuring renewal of licenses and payments. With so many services being used across the entire company, it can quickly become messy and hard to manage. Date reminder automations simplify this process, by sending a quick reminder as soon as the renewal date arrives. That way, no need to memorize dates or use sticky notes - the system will do the hard work for you!

Tip: Another powerful way to utilize automations is by creating a cascade of notifications that whenever one stakeholder has approved the new platform, the next stakeholder is informed that it's his/her turn to look into it and approve it. This will easily eliminate the time-consuming back and forths between all stakeholders. Search for the following automation in the automation center: When a status changes to something, notify someone

Collaborate in context using the notes and updates section

Communicating and collboarating is made so much easier with the Update Section and Status label notes. Mention colleagues, comment and write important information within the context of the each new service. Forget about searching through long email threads and free up your precious time. 

Use views and dashboards to gain insights

While each board can be used for the day-to-day management keeping your IT team on top of their game, the multitude of views and dashboards can provide overviews and drill-downs of your data.

You can gain overviews of where all onboarding employees stand at any given moment, which of your inventory requires the most amount of maintanance, and even which of your IT team members are over or underassigned to tasks.

One important view to check out is the Chart view. Below, you can see how this is used to see at a glance which team is growing the quickest (Sales), and onboarding the most new employees. 

Use dashboards to pull together data from multiple boards and get a bird's eye view of everything going on across your IT operations.

Summary

• The IT Onboarding board will be used to manage all IT operations for new employees who have joined the company.
• Automations and timelines will keep the IT team on track to make the transition as smooth as possible.
• The Inventory Management board is where all inventory will be tracked, keeping everything updated and well maintained.
• The last board, Procurement Process board, will streamline and simply the procurement process, making cross-department collaboration easier than ever.
• Automatic date reminders will make sure that payments are done on time for essential services that keep things running.
• Lastly, views and dashboards will provide overviews and  breakdowns of all your IT operations so you can plan, track and implement better in the future. 

There you go - three simple yet efficient boards to help you manage your core IT processes on monday.com!

If you have any questions, please reach out to our team right here. We’re available 24/7 and happy to help.